Continuous deployment
Continuous deployment automatically deploys every change that passes the test suite into production — no human gate between merging code and serving traffic. CD assumes high test coverage, automated rollback, and observability strong enough to catch issues in production within minutes.
Distinguishing terms: continuous integration (merge to main frequently), continuous delivery (every change is deployable), continuous deployment (every change is automatically deployed). Most B2B teams stop at continuous delivery — they want the option to ship but keep a human in the loop for compliance or change-management reasons. Consumer-scale teams (Amazon, Netflix) deploy thousands of times a day via full CD.
Related terms
- Blue-green deploy
Blue-green deployment maintains two identical production environments — blue (current) and green (new).
- Canary release
A canary release routes a small percentage of production traffic (typically 1-5%) to a new version, monitors error rates and latency, and rolls forward to 100% only when metrics stay healthy.
- Feature flag
A feature flag is a runtime toggle that gates whether a code path is active.